It’s been 11 years since I “transitioned” from a full-time academic teaching career at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Criminology. With over 40 years of teaching experience at the college/university level, I was privileged to have also engaged in a large variety of criminal justice research studies in New York and Pennsylvania. Directing the first study in the country on HIV/AIDs in a state correctional system (New York) and conducting research in seven Pennsylvania counties related to jail crowding, I knew I would not want to fully retire from scholarly endeavors.
Continuing in my role as editor of the Prison Journal, I am still immersed in national and international research related to corrections and key issues like mass incarceration, recruiting national and international scholars to assemble special journal study issues on mental health, higher education and the arts in prison, and people of color re-entry experiences. In 2016, I investigated the work of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative in Pennsylvania, an in-depth evaluation of punishment and its economic costs in the commonwealth at the county and state level. The findings made it clearer than ever that poverty and lack of opportunity, topics I had emphasized in teaching the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department’s Advanced Policy class for 12 years, have been major drivers of Pennsylvania’s incarceration rate for the last 40 years.
So, in 2019, I formed and funded a research institute and recruited three former criminology doctoral students, now faculty—Dr. Tim Holler, University of Pittsburgh—Greensburg; Dr. Renee Lamphere, University of North Carolina—Pembroke; and Dr. Kyle Ward, University of Northern Colorado—to engage in a five-week summer study of concentrated poverty in Pennsylvania. Northeastern Pennsylvania, the area in which I grew up, was labeled “a pocket of poverty” in the late 1960s, denoting the area’s economic demise as the anthracite coal mining industry continued its downward spiral. Living below the poverty line but graduating valedictorian of my high school class, I was only able to attend college when a College Misericordia Sister of Mercy advocated for me. Because of Sister Mary Hidegarde, I was granted full honor and work scholarships and graduated magna cum laude—laying the foundation for my future scholarly work.
My life’s experience growing up in a family that worked hard to survive at the poverty level has pretty much defined who I am. Following the 2008 Great Recession, all of Pennsylvania’s former key manufacturing regions were especially impacted, and rural parts of the state never fully recovered. The focus on rural America during the 2016 Presidential campaign and my research and publishing with rural criminology scholars from 2018 to 2021 motivated me to enlist the IUP scholar-teachers to focus on three rural and three urban Pennsylvania counties for indicators of concentrated poverty in particular census tracts, drawing on a specialized dataset and maps designed for us by the Pennsylvania Data Center. We were not surprised to uncover data that document persistent poverty across Pennsylvania’s small rural and urban communities, echoing the passing of many of the manufacturing and agricultural economic enterprises that characterized the commonwealth during and after the Industrial Revolution. Notably, rural Indiana County, Pennsylvania, stood out for a continuing trend of the highest poverty level in Southwestern Pennsylvania—the recent census finds the county’s percentage of population in poverty at 34.7 percent—“the largest of all places in the greater region.”
With my research colleagues returning to their busy lives as teaching faculty also engaged in writing books and conducting other studies, I was invited to my undergraduate college in Luzerne County—now Misericordia University—in September 2019 as an “alumna in residence.” My observations around my hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and interviews with a Wilkes University economic policy group only confirmed our findings. Luzerne County, once leading the nation in coal production that fueled industrial growth, is now characterized as a county with economic structural deficits and much-needed investments in housing, infrastructure, employment, and education. The data particularly emphasize the effects of poverty on the county’s single-parent families, high percentage of elderly, and Hispanic immigrant population—variables that impact a number of counties in Pennsylvania today.
Indeed, our 2019 poverty study highlighted the issue of concentrated disadvantage related to Black and Hispanic young people moving into Pennsylvania’s small cities and rural towns. For example, we identified the lack of diversity in Pennsylvania’s elementary and high school teachers and the growing percentages of Black and Hispanic students in the state’s poorest school districts. These findings and my stay at Misericordia came together to refocus my efforts from scholarship to scholarships. For the last 20 years, Misericordia’s Women and Children Program has supported young mothers in completing four-year college degrees. To date, over 30 women have graduated, having lived in special campus housing with their young children, many of whom have gone on to attend the university as their mothers went on to pursue master’s degrees. I immediately began conversations with the director of the program and established the Gido Fund for Community Justice and Mercy (Centre County Foundation). I have been privileged to meet two young women graduates and their children who are recent recipients of the scholarship. Notably, the Program for Women is receiving national recognition with a Robin Hood Foundation Grant to develop initiatives in northeastern Pennsylvania and the recently launched Parent Pathways out of Poverty. I have begun to network to recruit candidates from central and western Pennsylvania rural regions as the program is adding two more houses on campus.
And our team’s research policy focus on Pennsylvania’s poorest school districts has recently been taken up by key education policy stakeholders. Six of these school districts (including my Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, district) are part of a school funding lawsuit that completed arguments in March 2022, asserting the inequity of the commonwealth’s education formula and reliance on the property tax has long disadvantaged the least wealthy school districts in Pennsylvania and continues to particularly impact fair and equitable educational opportunities for Black and Hispanic/Latino students. Returning again to the 2019 research findings, Dr. Cassandra Reyes (Westchester University) and I are returning to scholarship, drawing on 2020 Census economic and demographic data from the Center on Rural Pennsylvania to investigate the relationship between school districts in concentrated poverty regions and barriers to educational opportunity for Black and Hispanic/Latino students.
Along with the scholarship endowment to Misericordia University, I have been able to establish a scholarship with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Foundation to support education for rural Pennsylvania young women heading to a university in the PASSHE system. I have been privileged to support a family friend’s granddaughter, who is now a sophomore at Bloomsburg University, and a neighbor’s niece, a freshman at Lock Haven University, where an IUP criminology PhD alum professor is now her advisor.
Just last week, I met with staff from the PASSHE Foundation and committed to two more scholarships for the school year 2023-24. It is my sincere hope that this essay will encourage young women high school seniors in Indiana County to apply and receive support for an excellent educational experience at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
(Revised 11/7/2022)
Editor’s Note: Rosemary Gido is an IUP professor emerita of criminology who retired in 2011 after 15 years of service. She spent 40 years teaching at the university level.